A recent scandal involving online training at Ernst & Young has pulled back the curtain on the time and ethical pressures accountants and finance teams are under to balance the demands of client work with ongoing professional training requirements. 

Earlier this month the Big Four accounting and consulting firm terminated dozens of U.S. staffers for simultaneously taking more than one online training class — which count toward required annual professional education credits — with the firm determining it was an “ethical breach” to “watch two at a time,” even as one person that was let go said they were not warned against the practice, The Financial Times reported. 

Given the demands CPAs face — often, they serve on understaffed teams due to a shortage of accounting talent, while also needing to obtain continuing professional education credits in order to maintain their certified public accounting licenses — some experts were not surprised to hear about the multi-tasking practice.  

“If firms are trying to maintain the same book of business with diminished bandwidth, naturally CPAs are going to deprioritize things that are not addressing their client work, with their CPE requirements being an easy one,” said Omar Roubi, an accounting instructor at the University of Colorado Denver and director of education and content at LumiQ, a podcasting app for CPAs. “Accountants have to do the same amount of work with less resources, with time being one of them.” 

A spokesperson for EY emailed a statement to CFO Dive confirming firings occurred, but declined to comment further on the record. “At EY, our core values of integrity and ethics are at the forefront of everything we do. Appropriate disciplinary action will be taken on any violation of our Code of Conduct and/or US Learning Policy.  EY US has terminated individuals who, after thorough investigation, were found to have violated our Global Code of Conduct and US Learning Policy,” the statement said. 

In an unrelated matter this week, but one where EY also took a tough ethical stand, the firm resigned as Super Micro Computer’s  registered public accounting firm, saying it had questions about whether the company was “committed to integrity and ethical values,” according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.  

The U.S. firings also come roughly two years after EY faced financial repercussions from a test-taking scandal. In 2022, the SEC fined EY $100 million for cheating by its auditors on ethics exams and for withholding evidence of wrongdoing from the agency’s enforcement division, CFO Dive previously reported.

Having been penalized before on a similar matter might have made EY more sensitive to such issues and led to its recent strong response to the online test taking, Daniel Tinkelman, a professor of accounting at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, said in an emailed response to questions.

If the matter involved CPE courses, Tinkelman said an employer like EY might have had no choice but to take action as states often require test takers to self report and certify that they spent a certain number of hours in the training. 

While Tinkelman said people often spend fewer hours on self-study courses than they report, in the past it would have been harder to catch with old-fashioned paper-based self-study programs, where no one could prove you were simultaneously taking two courses at one time. But nowadays online courses can typically be tracked and audited, Tinkelman said.

If that was the case,“it is a provably false statement made to fake compliance with state license requirements. An employer who becomes aware of this sort of intentional violation of rules would seem to me to have a duty to act in some way,” Tinkelman said. “Also, if people claimed to have worked 16 hours, and put in for overtime, when they only worked 6, that’s claiming unearned pay, and no employer is likely to sympathize with that.”

Roubi discussed whether EY’s firing of the employees was a fitting response to the online training situation with his ethics students, and the group came out supportive of EY’s action, he said. EY needed to terminate the employees to send a message both inside and outside of the firm that it values “a culture of learning and ethical behavior,” he said the group decided. However, Roubi himself said he felt the company might have gone too far. 

“I do think this is an overreach because I imagine these staff personnel were viewing multiple webinars at once in order to get their CPE done in the most efficient manner in order to focus on their client work,” he said. “I don't personally believe the punishment fits the crime, unless it comes to light that these employees had a track record of this kind of behavior.” 

Going forward, Roubi is also hopeful that companies will make it clear to employees if taking training courses simultaneously is prohibited, if they do not already do so.